As a SELA student I often get asked what it is that we learn, and why we learn it, by fellow students. When I explain that we explore how to be effective leaders in engineering, the conversation can go in all sorts of directions, however many of them have the same reaction. Surely leadership theory is just that: theoretical, and in the end it all just wastes time that you could be using running simulations, writing code or researching components.


They commended us on including it, and said that if they were in our position, presenting to their management, these would be the things their directors are looking for. They asked about our time plan, our budget, our goal-setting, and our division of labour. We had concrete answers to each, and none seemed particularly tricky to address. The group before us had also been questioned about a risk assessment, something no group (including us) had thought to carry out. We too were called out on this by one of the members of the panel, but before we could answer, one of the other panellists actually explained to the room that though we hadn’t included a formal risk assessment, there was

The whole experience has left me realising that the time we spent on setting targets, measuring progress, and illustrating how, why and when we’d reached a decision may have seemed a bit arduous at the time, but wasn’t “wasted” at all. When it came to justifying decisions, having a management context made it much easier for others to follow our conclusions, and gave a much bigger picture than anything we could even hope to describe in the 15 minutes allotted to us. Chances are that in engineering, when you talk about what you’ve achieved in a project, the final decision is fairly unimportant, so long as it works safely and effectively. What is important is that you show your path toward that decision, including all of the non-technical criteria that played a role.
SELA tries to highlight the importance of this in any future roles engineering students may have. All of the alumni and industry experts that come in to speak to us hardly ever talk about any specific inventions or designs that they’ve contributed to. They always talk about how their most successful projects are the ones where communication up and down a leadership hierarchy has been effective, and where decisions have been justified from a commercial or social point of view as well as the purely technical.
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